u/delinquentsaviors

I just want to say it’s the highlight of my day when I see someone post their enormous gecko with this question and every comment is about how fat the gecko is.

So, I think we all know there is a chunk of time spent waiting on SMEs to be available to draft or answer questions or provide approvals. Really everything we do is dependent on their availability and responsiveness.

My new manager is the stakeholders manager. Manager doesn’t really understand technical writing and seems to think I don’t have enough work. I have tried to explain that there are bottlenecks and that even if it doesn’t look like I’m actively working, I have about 40 in flight documents in various stages of development currently.

How do you manage your downtime or at least communicate it to managers? These SMEs are incredibly busy, so I don’t want to harass them all day to keep busy. But I also don’t want to accept busy work from manager.

As we get closer to the movie I just wanted to commiserate with all the people on this sub who also don’t like SOTR by listing all the things I can’t stand about it.

- Haymitch following the same plot as Katniss basically but “what if it was more outlandish”
- The kumbaya scenes with most of the tributes attaching themselves to Haymitch.
- The bizarre portrayal of Snow after the nuanced story in Ballad. Why did he feel the need to reveal his relationship with Lucy Gray to some kid? It’s too much of a “hey look it’s a reference to Ballad” type of scene and it’s dumb.
- The unnecessary amount of cameos. We have Beetee and Mags and Wiress and Effie.
- The repetitive prose. How many times do they repeat “painting their own poster”
- The incompetence of the Capitol dialed up so far that it’s not even believable anymore. The issues at the Reaping? Fine, believable. Workers cleaning the arena during active games with tributes around, a mishap at the chariot parade so severe that they get a body double for the dead girl? Seriously?
- all the pages wasted on song and poem lyrics.

I genuinely don’t even think Suzanne wrote this book except for the last few chapters (which are brilliant) and I cannot understand why it’s become so widely loved.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Edit: ok so Collins probably did write it but I feel like there was a ton of behind the scenes pressure from the publishing company or the movie studio. With Ballad, you could really feel she wanted to explore how a dictator is able to rise to power and was passionate about the subject. I don’t get that sense from this book.

I was moved from an independent procedure writing team to reporting directly to the manager of the departments we support and I’m struggling quite a lot.

They expect me as the writer to know their controls and their process and only engage SMEs for approval. Apparently I’m supposed to know if their control language is correct?

When I express normal concerns with process managers and SMEs not being available for documentation meetings, the manager responds that I as the procedure writer should be owning the whole project and “making things easier for the managers who are so busy”.

Anyone have any tips or advice? I’m getting pretty irritated.